Where Are The Midwives?

Mark 13:1-8

 This past September, mothers took their children out of school to go to a funeral. It wasn't a relative who had died or the next door neighbor. It wasn't even someone the children knew except from television and papers. But these parents wanted their children to know this death was not a movie. Not fiction. They wanted their children to see Robert Sandifer in the coffin. We came to know him too, that eleven year old boy known as Yummy because he loved to eat especially cookies. We saw the pictures: the open casket, the dead boy in suit and tie. We saw whole families of young children walking up to the coffin, some standing on tiptoe to see. Robert should have been playing baseball or climbing a tree, but he was dead. Shot in the head by two boys from his own gang. Not that Robert was innocent; he was himself a killer, the selected hitman for the gang which had become his family. Three days before his funeral, Robert fired a pistol into a group of teenagers. An innocent girl fell to the pavement, killed by bullets meant for someone else. An eleven year-old murderer lying in a casket. Two teenage boys charged with his murder. A fourteen year old girl dead because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The news came from Chicago, but it could have been my city. And even if you live in a place where such tragedy is unimaginable, Robert is somehow your child and mine. There is an African proverb which says, "It takes a whole village to raise a child" - and our American village is not doing so well. Rest in peace, Robert. Rest in peace.

In such a world as this, who can believe Jesus' words about birth pangs? How can birth come from such tragedy and pain? How can it happen that Sarajevo was destroyed before our eyes - this civilized modern city which hosted the winter Olympics! How can we bear the stories of thousands of women raped as spoils of war? How can we comprehend the slaughter in Rwanda, neighbors over a lifetime killing each other for fear of being killed? One little boy told reporters that he hid for a day under piles of bodies in a church before he dared to rum away. Now he hardly talks as he plays with another boy in the graveyard which has become their only playground. Who dares to come into the graveyard speaking of birth pangs?

"Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs." Jesus dares these words. He is speaking to his disciples - and since the end has not yet come, his words have been passed on now to us in this generation, this world so torn apart. If these are birth pangs, it seems clear that we are in for a long labor. Indeed, it has already been too long for Jesus words will soon be two thousand years old. The disciples thought their generation would be the last. They expected labor to move quickly toward the birth of a new age. But it did not happen in their lifetime. And every generation since Jesus' time has had good reason to believe the end was near. "You will hear wars and rumors of wars.." has that not been true? Every generation has pointed to the signs. Today, in many Christian bookstores they display feature books predicting the end of time. It doesn't seem to matter what Jesus said about such predictions - and he said it plainly later in this thirteenth chapter of Mark. "But about that day or hour no one knows. neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the father." It is clear that many writers beg to disagree with Jesus.

It may well be that signs of the end time are easier to believe than birth pangs. A woman in labor has the strong sense that there's no turning back once the contractions begin - but we don't know what to do with that image outside the delivery room. The midwife encourages the woman to keep pushing. The pain is a sign that all is moving toward birth - you can't stop now! But it is not birth pangs we feel as we turn off the 6:00 news because we cannot bear it. This does not feel like birth pangs.

Even though the midwife says there is no turning back, we try. Perhaps we can remember a better time we can believe that such a time will come again. In my first year at Our Savior's Atonement Lutheran Church in New York City, one of the older members came to me in early December and asked "Pastor, do you think we could have four men as ushers on Christmas Eve?" It was a question borne of the hope that our congregation would become again like it once was when four men carried plates brimming with offering envelopes up the center aisle, when even the balcony was filled with worshippers. Her words also carried memories of the days when she was younger, an artist doing portraits in Washington Square. The ushers in her mind recalled better days when her mother was still living and their apartment building had a doorman. Sometimes, I stand dreaming of such bygone days myself when I enter the lobby of a building in my neighborhood. It is clear that there was once a chandelier in the vaulted ceiling, long ago ripped out or stolen. Now a dim florescent fixture filled with dead bugs attempts to light the once grand room. "It must have been something," I say aloud to no one but myself. "Imagine how wonderful New York City must have been in those days!" But the voice of the labor room nurse breaks in: "I know it's hard, but you can't go back. You have to keep going."

"This is the beginning of the birth pangs," said Jesus.

This word is hard. It is easier to buy the book detailing the wars and rumors of wars, noting the number and location of earthquakes and the size of recent famines. But that book doesn't know what to do with the birth pangs. Who would believe such a book anyway - and who would buy it?

But surely Jesus chose the words carefully. Birth pangs - but that's what Jesus said, that's what he meant. Oh, it wasn't the only thing he said, he chided the disciples for being so impressed with the large stones of the temple. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." But Jesus didn't speak only of destruction and dying - even these things are the beginning of the birth pangs. How can this be? the disciples must have wondered. How can this be?

Two years ago I heard German theologian Jurgan Moltmann speak at a conference in Pennsylvania. He was talking about eschatology, that is, end times. Has Jesus changed the way we think about the future, how we move toward it? If so, does this also change how we live in the present? Professor Moltmann put two words on the blackboard: extrapolation and anticipation.

Extrapolation is one way of looking toward the future, he said. Social scientists, demographers, city planners and many others carefully study the present situation. Using statistics about population, aging, birthrates, economic growth and a host of other factors, they extrapolate into the future. They look at what is in order to predict what will be. This is one way of looking and it is important. We need to plan wisely and compassionately for the future. But extrapolation is not the only way of looking at the world.

Anticipation is another way of looking, a word that comes closer to the Christian understanding of eschatology - a vision of God's future breaking into the present. Anticipation is not limited to what we now see and experience. It cannot be measured by statistic analysis. Anticipation sees possibilities which do not now exist. The present is not only shaped by what is, but by God's idea of what will be. God is in labor from the future toward the present. God gives hope not measured by statistics - hope which goes beyond the evidence of what we see.

It is this hope that Jesus brings. Jesus stands with us looking at the world we know. He takes the hand of a little girl peering into Robert's coffin and weeps in the graveyard where the Rwandan children play in silence. Jesus hears what we hear - wars and rumors of wars, the sound of nation rising up against nation. Jesus will not argue when we say things seem worse instead of better.

 But then, Jesus turns to us and asks, "Where are the midwives?"

After all these years, Jesus still insists on birth pangs. He is not persuaded by the racks full of books saying, "Lo, here! Lo, there! The end is in sight!" Jesus is too busy calling forth the midwives - and children who dare to feel birth pangs in the face of too much dying.

Last year a pastor friend of mine met with members of St. John's Lutheran Church in Newark, New Jersey. It is the only Lutheran church left in that large city where once there were thirteen. My friend went to St. John's on behalf of the bishop of the synod to see what could be done to keep St. John's alive. It wasn't at all clear that the little band of believers left at St. John's could afford a pastor. Some couldn't imagine they'd be there long enough to install a pastor. At one meeting, the people began to talk about those who had moved away. Many had tried for years to keep businesses going, but the odds were against them. They had gone out of business, moved out of the city if they could. "You can walk down these streets and see one store after another boarded up, bombed out," they told the pastor. She knew it was true. She had walked the streets. She had read stacks of studies on Newark's economy and the collapse of the schools. She couldn't point to many hopeful signs in the blocks around St. John's, and neither could anybody else.

Except the midwife. She stood up, this elder woman far past the age of child-bearing, and declared in no uncertain terms, "Nobody can put God out of business." Then she sat down. "Did you hear what I said? God hasn't gone out of business." She could somehow see her world, her city, her street, her church, her own life as God's laboring from the future. She could anticipate, not extrapolate. If she looked around, she saw a cycle of poverty hard to break, streets controlled by drug dealers, jails filling faster than colleges, stores abandoned, and her own church down to a handful of people dwarfed in a cavernous sanctuary. Extrapolate into the year 2,000 and you'd surely close St. John's church.

But she felt birth pangs long after such things should be possible. She was not naive - She'd lived too long for that. And she was not crazy. She's seen some good times and plenty of bad. She remembered days which were far better - but she knew she couldn't live backward. She'd lived through wars and wasn't surprised by rumors of more. Her television carried the same news as yours and mine. Still, she dared to stand up and say, "God hasn't gone out of business."

Soon after that, the people of St. John's called my friend to be their pastor. They are reclaiming their ministry in that city. They are hard at work restoring the parsonage so their pastor can live in the midst of them. With the help of the larger Church they are not only committed to keeping this lone Lutheran Church alive -they have a five-year plan to start new congregations' On Good Friday last year they walked the stations of the cross on the streets of their community. At one of the stops they shared the corner with drug dealers who didn't feel like moving. "Behold the life-giving cross" pastor and people sang together. They sang in the face of too much dying.

And at that moment they joined hands with the children who gathered around Robert's coffin and the mourners of Sarajevo; they reached out to the boys playing in silence in the Rwandan graveyard. "Behold the life-giving cross" they sang. It was the sound of birth pangs. Then they walked on, midwives in the streets of Newark.

Barbara K. Lundblad Protestant Hour